diff mbox

[v2,1/2] Kconfig: improve KALLSYMS_ALL documentation

Message ID 1301999098-21412-1-git-send-email-dedekind1@gmail.com (mailing list archive)
State New, archived
Headers show

Commit Message

Artem Bityutskiy April 5, 2011, 10:24 a.m. UTC 
From: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>

Dumb users like myself are not able to grasp from the existing KALLSYMS_ALL
documentation that this option is not what they need. Improve the help
message and make it clearer that KALLSYMS is enough in the majority of
use cases, and KALLSYMS_ALL should really be used very rarely.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
---
 init/Kconfig |   18 ++++++++++++------
 1 files changed, 12 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

Changelog:
v1->v2:
	* Spelling fix

Comments

Artem Bityutskiy April 13, 2011, 10:22 a.m. UTC | #1 
On Tue, 2011-04-05 at 13:24 +0300, Artem Bityutskiy wrote:
> From: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
> 
> Dumb users like myself are not able to grasp from the existing KALLSYMS_ALL
> documentation that this option is not what they need. Improve the help
> message and make it clearer that KALLSYMS is enough in the majority of
> use cases, and KALLSYMS_ALL should really be used very rarely.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>

Michal,

what's the fate of these 2 patches? Will you merge them?
diff mbox

Patch

diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig
index 56240e7..563065d 100644
--- a/init/Kconfig
+++ b/init/Kconfig
@@ -968,12 +968,18 @@  config KALLSYMS_ALL
 	bool "Include all symbols in kallsyms"
 	depends on DEBUG_KERNEL && KALLSYMS
 	help
-	   Normally kallsyms only contains the symbols of functions, for nicer
-	   OOPS messages.  Some debuggers can use kallsyms for other
-	   symbols too: say Y here to include all symbols, if you need them 
-	   and you don't care about adding 300k to the size of your kernel.
-
-	   Say N.
+	   Normally kallsyms only contains the symbols of functions for nicer
+	   OOPS messages and backtraces (i.e., symbols from the text and inittext
+	   sections). This is sufficient for most cases. And only in very rare
+	   cases (e.g., when a debugger is used) all symbols are required (e.g.,
+	   names of variables from the data sections, etc).
+
+	   This option makes sure that all symbols are loaded into the kernel
+	   image (i.e., symbols from all sections) in cost of increased kernel
+	   size (depending on the kernel configuration, it may be 300KiB or
+	   something like this).
+
+	   Say N unless you really need all symbols.
 
 config KALLSYMS_EXTRA_PASS
 	bool "Do an extra kallsyms pass"